HAIL, CAESAR!
Universal Pictures
Reviewed by: Harvey Karten for Shockya, d-based on Rotten Tomatoes
Grade: B+
Director: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Written by: Joel Coen, Ethan Coen
Cast: George Clooney, Josh Brolin, Alden Ehrenreich, Channing Tatum, Scarlett Johansson, Ralph Fiennes, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand
Screened at: Regal E-Walk, NYC, 2/2/16
Opens: February 5, 2016
Irving Berlin’s song “There’s no business like show business” may have been written for the stage, but it sure as hell0 applies as well to movies. Consider this: Eddie Mannix (Josh Brolin), who works as a movie studio “fixer” in the 1950s, receives a lucrative offer from an aviation company, one that would give him a ten-year contract with a job that’s less stressful than that of a fixer. Should he take it? You would, wouldn’t you? But showbiz is in Eddie’s DNA, and although he goes to confession every few hours, feeling guilty even just for lying to his wife about his smoking, he gives serious thought to chucking what will probably be the best money deal he will ever receive.
A fixer in the movie business is an executive who keeps his actors in line, making sure that the gossip columnists and, for that matter, the law, do not infringe on the studio’s reputation. If this sounds like an easy job, just watch what Eddie Mannix goes through in a single day. He’s under a great deal of pressure, given what’s been going on within just twenty-four hours, but you in the movie audience will not be. Instead you’ll probably enjoy the laughs, the sorrows, the hijinks as only the Coen Brothers could evoke, as Joel and Ethan Coen, well known for such diverse and sophisticated films as “Inside Llewyn Davis” (a week in the life of a Greenwich Village folk singer in 1961), “No Country for Old Men” (violence ensues when a hunter discovers money from a drug deal gone wrong), and “The Hudsucker Proxy” (a naïve business school grad gets the job of company president in a scam stock deal), develop a series of scenes run by a large studio.
(To clarify what a fixer does, look to developments in the career of Rock Hudson, best known perhaps as Elizabeth Taylor’s handsome lover in the movie “Giant.” While his career developed, Hudson’s agent Henry Willson, acting as a fixer, kept the actor’s personal life out of the headlines. In 1955, Confidential magazine threatened to publish an exposé about Hudson’s secret homosexual life. Willson stalled this by disclosing information about two of his other clients.)
Eddie Mannix is helping several productions especially one entitled “Hail, Caesar!” starring famous actor Baird Whitlock (George Clooney). When Whitlock is kidnapped by a group named “The Future,” Mannix has the job of collecting $100,000 ransom to rescue him from a band of Communists and to keep the news from gossip columnists, principally Thora and Thessaly Thacker (both played by Tilda Swinton). That’s not all by a long shot: when on another project, an innocent starlet DeeAnna Moran (Scarlett Johansson) is pregnant and unmarried (this is the 1950’s, remember), Mannix has to keep the press off the scent.
Writer-directors Joel and Ethan Coen Brothers find this central role of fixer the unifying element to release a number of scenes of various films on which the studio is working, giving us in the audience an inkling of what a major film group does. The most exciting scene introduces Channing Tatum as an thoroughly accomplished singer and dancer with a band of fellow sailors striking a show-stopping musical interlude that could have come out of “South Pacific.” Tatum in the role of Burt Gurney and his Navy pals dance both solo and with one another, regretting that they will spend too much time at sea without seeing “dames.”
In another scene that evokes the spirit of last year’s fantastic political film “Trumbo,” the Coens satirize the frenzy caused by fear of Communism in the 1950s. Would-be revolutionaries including plotters played by Fred Melamed, David Krumholtz, Patrick Fischler and Fisher Stevens groan about their exploitation, noting that script writing, in their opinion, is the principal engine of successful movies but the writers barely get noticed or paid. Led by Burt Gurney’s Channing Tatum, they seize the $100,000 ransom and row out to sea to meet a huge Soviet submarine, employing Gurney to deliver the loot to the Comintern. Tatum is so charismatic that even his pet terrier refuses to go back with the writers but instead jumps about the sub to be in Tatum’s arms.
This is an expensive movie, one which includes an Esther Williams-style scene such as you’d find in the 1945 film “The Ziegfeld Follies,” and most significant, a kaleidoscope of vistas featuring Alden Ehrenreich as Hobie Doyle, a fellow who is excellent in Westerns but is so unable to act credibly in a comedy of manners that even his accomplished director Laurence Laurentz (Ralph Fiennes) cannot get him correctly to say “Would that ‘twere true.”
“Hail, Caesar!” bookended by a pair of scenes in the days of ancient Rome ending during the crucifixion of Christ (in a spoof of large, Biblically-inspired pics), makes sport of George Clooney’s performance as a Roman soldier whose kidnapping by the Communists puts stress on the fixer. While some other scenes fall flat, on the whole, the picture is a grand satire making good use of some top actors with enough variety to please both those who want simple entertainment on a grand scale and others who favor real wit in dialogue.
Rated PG-13. 105 minutes. © Harvey Karten, Member, New York Film Critics Online
Story – B+
Acting – B+
Technical – A-
Overall – B+
